Stratford East

The ingredients to this 2012 play by Moonlight screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney feel familiar. Elite American high school, scholarship choir boys, one gay and bullied. A floppy-haired ‘think-outside-the-box’ teacher in the vein of The History Boys’ Hector or Dead Poets’ Society’s Keating.But in unfolding vignettes, arguments, sung spirituals and choral scenes – directed tenderly by Nancy Medina and Tatenda Shamiso in a production which ran in Bristol in 2023 – it becomes clear how McCraney is lulling us into familiar territory in order to then drift in his own direction.This is a story about how hard it is to be gay in high school, but main character Pharus is happily out and unashamed. The structures around him are trying to squeeze him back into the closet: ‘Tighten up’, is the headmaster’s gentle but dumb advice. ‘Keep them guessing – at least so they can’t ask’. Pharus has no desire to keep them guessing.Playing him, Terique Jarrett is so entertaining, with a loose physicality and a tendency to turn everything into a joke, partly a defence mechanism, but also just bursting with music and fun and refusing to let others make him feel unhappy. His adversary is Rabi Kondé’s Bobby, nephew of the headmaster, and envious of Pharus’s self-possession, whose homophobia causes the friction of the play.The other three could do with being more rounded; too often they’re backup singers rather than soloists, though they each get a moment to show themselves, especially Freddie...

This review is from 2025. They Harder They Come returns for 2026 with a largely unchanged core cast. Let’s be honest, you’re probably booking a ticket to a stage adaptation of The Harder They Come for the songs. Perry Henzell’s seminal 1972 film is the movie that introduced reggae to the world, after all. But Suzan-Lori Parks’s new version of the stage musical – the second to have been staged at Stratford East after a hit 2006 version by Henzell himself – is as much about the grit of the production, impeccably directed by Matthew Xia, as it is the groove of its soundtrack. And yes, of course, Jimmy Cliff’s anthems are as rousing as ever. The soundtrack roars, cracks and prickles in the hands of this killer cast, led by Natey Jones. Big hitters like the aspirational ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’ and the haunting power ballad ‘Many Rivers to Cross’ are so stirring, members of the audience can’t help but join in, to sing along.  Telling the story of Ivan (Jones) a young man who arrives in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1971, eager to make a name for himself in the music industry, the book by Parks folds in the textures of city life, from the bustle of bars and backstreets to the weight of financial insecurity. Frustrated by his failure to climb to the top, Ivan slides his way into crime, eventually having to go on the run after shooting a police officer. The story lacks the agony that was layered into the film’s fabric. But it is Xia’s ability to paint vivid stage pictures that...